In rendering his most avant-garde characters as members of a kind of self-help conspiracy in The Made-Up Man, Joseph Scapellato offers not an update but a revision of absurdism, and as such, many social phenomena ripe for satire get off easy.

Yanis Varoufakis treats with disdain the idea that economics is a real science – it's more like a contemporary form of religion, propped up by ruling elites to make gullible everyday people remain subservient and go along with the elites' bad and self-serving ideas, he says.